R. J. CARDULLO1

17. THE THEATER-OF-FILM OF HANS-JÜRGEN SYBERBERG: PARSIFAL AND DIE NACHT

Two works by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg best exemplify what I describe in my title as the “theater of film”: Parsifal (1982) and Die Nacht (The Night, 1985). Let’s begin with the earlier picture, whose subject should be no surprise if one knows Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) and if one has seen Syberberg’s Our Hitler (1977; a.k.a., Hitler, A Film from Germany). (The connection between Wagner and Hitler is the fact that the Führer venerated Wagner’s works and saw them as embodying true German ideals.) No, you should not be surprised by Syberberg’s choice to make a film of Wagner’s work; nor should you be surprised by this director’s general approach to his subject. But this Parsifal, among its fascinations, does have a surprising new aspect—to which I shall return. Syberberg’s obsession with Wagner has long been familiar. The first film of his to be shown in the United States, The Confessions of Winifred Wagner (1975), was a 104-minute condensation of the five-hour interview, made for German television, which he conducted with her. Wagner, musically and otherwise, is present in several other Syberberg films. And one of the most vivid images in postwar German cinema occurs in Our Hitler: the toga-clad Hitler rising from a grave that has a stone marked “RW.” In Syberberg’s view, then, Parsifal must be the most representative of Wagner’s works, the most beautiful but silly, exalted yet pretentious, noble at the same time it is vicious—all the contradictions that Syberberg patently finds in German character and behavior. Wagner himself, of course, is prototypical of a great deal that both repels and fascinates about Germany. On the one hand there is Wagner, the maniacal, blood- and-iron, anti-Semitic Teuton. On the other hand, there is Wagner, the titanic genius whom the young Nietzsche saw as the new Prometheus restoring Dionysian flame to a pallid civilization. (And the older Nietzsche never really recanted. As Thomas Mann remarked, “Nietzsche’s polemic against Wagner pricks our enthusiasm for the composer rather than tames it.”)2 Eric Bentley, in that masterwork The Playwright as Thinker (1946), goes as far as to pair Wagner with Ibsen as one of the two great modern exponents of tragedy. Yet this is, inseparably, the same Richard Wagner who inspired Adolf Hitler, and whose anti-Semitism is sometimes seen as Syberberg’s own. Wagner’s score for Parsifal, which (I think) Syberberg uses uncut, is a succession of marvels that coalesce into a gigantic marvel; yet the libretto, or poem as Wagner

R. J. Cardullo (Ed.), Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the Film Director as Critical Thinker, 205–215. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. R. J. Cardullo called it, is itself less than completely cogent. The atmosphere may be as spiritual as anything in Wagner, but he explicitly intended the work as an Aryan, anti-Semitic allegory. (Admittedly, the first conductor was a Jew.) Moreover, it is an allegory that idealizes (again) Wagner’s view of male innocence beset by the temptations of woman: as in Tannhäuser’s enslavement within the Venusberg in Tannhäuser; or in Siegfried’s cutting open the armor of the sleeping Brünnhilde, in the third part of Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs, 1876), and exclaiming naïvely, “Das ist kein Mann!” Be that as it may, the Parsifal-Kundry encounter in Act II is still one of the most perceptive sexual rites of passage in drama. (Kundry entices Parsifal by speaking of his mother—more than a decade before Freud.) Writing from Bayreuth in 1889, Bernard Shaw had this to say on the subject: “And that long kiss of Kundry’s from which [Parsifal] learns so much is one of those pregnant simplicities which stare the world in the face for centuries and yet are never pointed out except by great men.”3

Figure 40. Parsifal, dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1982

No wonder, then, that Syberberg, only one of a number of German artists who have simultaneously loved and loathed their country, should respond to Parsifal. Nonetheless, a question persists. Not the question of Syberberg’s alleged anti- Semitism or ultra-nationalism, the political nature of which does not interest me. The question that persists is an aesthetic one, and one that leads to the surprise mentioned earlier. Why did he film a work that was already famous in another medium? His previous films had been entirely his own creations. Why this co-creation? Here, Syberberg did begin with a new recording of Parsifal, but, except for bits of music rehearsals under the credits and a few snatches of random voices after the finish, he simply supplied visuals to accompany that recording. Again, why?

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